The tablet market is heating up

In February 2010 Apple announced their iPad which a lot of critics called then just a bigger iPod touch which nobody needs. Apple did define a new type of computer, slimmer than netbooks and faster and more colorful than ebooks, but less speed, memory and size than notebooks.

Who in the world does need another device? Apple proofed we needed a new device between smart phone and notebook. In April the iPad got shipped and after only 2 months they sold over 3 Million.

Six months after the first iPad got shipped the market has changed. The iPad was just the beginning. Many manufactures did follow.
First the German company Neofonie announced their WePad with memo a Linux based tablet computer which just got released as WeTab starting at $499.



Then Samsung released their Galaxy Tab in the UK with a two years carrier contract which will translate into $1000 running android.



Shortly after Dell announced a 7inch slate as the big brother of the 5inch Dell streak phone. Both are running on android.


Today we did read about the Blackberry playbook a 7inch tablet with two cameras for business customers starting at $499.




HP announced at the CES their slate which is a 9.7inch touchscreen computer with either windows 7mobile, Palm Os or both, price around $500. But not released yet





And there might be many more coming as I posted a few weeks ago.

But really interesting is that none of them are cheaper than the iPad, but have two things the iPad does not.
Flash and cameras (at least one camera). They are all either more heavy or smaller than iPad but interesting not cheaper even if everybody said the iPad is too expensive.

Rumors are around that Apple is already producing the second iPad generation as a 7inch version and with camera. Which is not typical for Apple to come with a second version before a year ends.

Back to the start of this blog, do we really don't need a bigger iPod touch? Maybe not, but interesting that all big players are following Apple. Most of them had netbooks before, but now they are moving to slates and starting to discontinue the netbooks.

Steve Jobs might had his downtime when he was fired from Apple in 1985 (The Man Who Fired Steve Jobs From Apple, John Sculley, Is Now Getting Fired By His Wife). And struggled 10 years with Pixar and Next till he came back to Apple. But since his comeback it seems that he can create any products he wants and we buy them and the rest of the manufactures try to follow him.
Note:
Next was not a total failure, iOs is using objective C, which was the base for nextstep the Next OS. Pixar needed long till it made money with Toys story. But a lot of UI inventions of Mac OsX are products which were originated by Pixar developers in the early years. Steve was not a software guy, he loved hardware but Pixar helped him to get a feeling for Art in software (Source "the second coming of Steve Jobs").

2011 will be hot with slates, and as a friend of mine says: "if it is released, it is already old, go to the next thing". He is so right, all the companies who are right now copying Apple to bring faster and better products to compare with iPad, are so busy with this that they will be late with the next big thing because Apple will have it already.

It is time that somebody steps out and does their own thing, the only way to be ahead of Apple, at least right now.

- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States